OXBOW: Escaping From a Penal Colony On the Planet Hot & Tight
You don't like Tour Diaries then here's a trigger warning: your ass is about to get shot with...a Tour Diary.
“Does OXBOW want to…” the phone line stuttered to life. “…maybe, tour with Mr. Bungle?”
First thing that must be understood is that no one usually wants to take OXBOW out on the road with them. If the rumors are to be believed we’re multiple liabilities, very possibly felonies, away from ruining everything. Either that or we’re very serious musical artists who take nothing seriously but the creation of musical art.
Or: both.
The reality is and remains, outside of Isis and then later Sumac, under the watchful eye of Aaron Turner, no one has ever thought it was a “good” idea to take us out on tour with them, rumors or no rumors. So when a call came in for something like this the response, largely and possibly correctly, is to greet it with paranoia and mistrust. Like, sure…someone is going to give us some Wonka golden ticket to tour with a band we love just because…? …We have vowels in our names? The cut of our jib? “Smart” “business” “sense”?
None of these. Just maybe it was the stars, the weather or something much more simple than fate, a celestial “why the fuck not?” In any case since a postcard from Steve Albini and a similar reaction two decades earlier bore great fruit in the creation of some of the music with him that got us here, we gave the only answer that made any kind of sense: “Sure.”
There are 1000 ways to say “yes”, and we’ve been exercising all of them.
Of course, touring with a band, if you’ve ever toured with a band, and here I don’t mean with another band but just the physical acts of touring alone are special in the extreme. Young bands always imagine that they want to do this and that the key to their fortunes and future successes have everything to do with it. I did my first tour in 1982 (after I had already driven across country, On the Road style once in 1981) and feel fairly certain what I’m doing at present (which is to say: as I write this) has nothing to do with success necessarily.
But it has everything to do with what made me laugh when one day my asshole boss said to me, in reference to what he sarcastically called my “music career” and the time I needed off to play some shows, that was “if you were going to make it you would have already made it.”
This was supposed to be hurtful and cutting but I just laughed. Like Brer Rabbit laughed just before they threw him in the briar patch where he was born. The rest of the world can think about “making it”. That’s not what that, or even this, is about.
The careerist notions that a young man might have had about hauling yourself all over G-d’s green earth to play some version of music to either a handful, or hundreds, or in the case of the present tour thousands of people, are gone by the time you’re 61. When you’re 19 it’s the non-duplicative experience that might be chased. Which is easy to chase because you can’t duplicate what you’ve never done.
At 61, every show is the hot metal imprimatur leaving its mark on the wax of forever because, and this is something everyone knows, you won’t be doing this 42 years from now. No, it’s all not to be duplicated but mostly because everything that gets done might be getting done for the last time. A truth about almost anything but feeling especially more true when it is this.
“Hey…remember me?”
Sometimes I do. Sometimes I don’t. The worst case? Meeting the only one-armed man I’ve ever met, 16 years after the first time I supposedly met him. I felt bad for this. Especially as I had met no more one-armed men before or since. I should have remembered him.
But this guy in Munich had both of his arms. One of which he was using to pull out his phone to prove to me that this was real. On it he had a photo of the two of us standing together, mugging for the camera. It was sure enough him and it was sure enough me. A younger me. Not so full of hope as might be expected when looking into the eyes of your younger self. In fact hope was not what I felt at all. But a certain type of suppressed despair.
[I]t made me feel like there was something wrong with me. In sort of a dark magus kind of way. I mean how was he managing to be so happy when death lurked around every corner?
That was then though and now, on the occasion of him wanting to take another photo to book-end the one he had just showed me, after he took it I looked at it and saw something different (because surely Munich has not changed). I was, while still mugging, vibing something different. Not hope, as much as what those a little more negative might call resignation but what I’m choosing to call “acceptance.”
Which is what got us, OXBOW, here. There are 1000 ways to say “yes”, and we’ve been exercising all of them. Not the old rock and roll cliches of sex, drugs and, yeah, that other thing. But yes to the possibility of violent death on the road, stabbings, street hassles, rip offs, too small crowds — here remembering Chuck Dukowski famously adding that it’s not the audiences’ fault that more people didn’t show up — too large crowds, and finally the loss of the very thing you were supposed to be touring for: cash. Which we guess would constitute “making it.”
Reminds me of when I started backing off of drug use. High on a bunch of blotter I had gobbled I had a moment of clarity while watching purple mosaic’d TV, Beavis and Butthead if memory serves: “I could do this, all of this, without being high.” And just like that, it was done.
All of that “yes” I could do never leaving my family and my home so why here, and why now? Well, yes, Mr. Bungle asked but because they asked, they might have done so because they knew, though. So I’d seek out their singer, band leader and label boss Mike Patton. I’d interviewed Patton before and found him to be convivial in the extreme. So much so that it made me feel like there was something wrong with me. In sort of a dark magus kind of way. I mean how was he managing to be so happy when death lurked around every corner?
When I finally found him it was backstage in Zurich and he stepped into the room, light manifest in his eyes, embraced me and then, at my urging, an intense 10-minute discussion. About? About ponds. And the fish in those ponds. And the vicissitudes of pond ownership, as well as a nod to the peace it brings.
The conversation wound down into a brief moment of silence, a moment where we just stood, until he wished me a good show and disappeared into the innards of the building to another dressing room.
After the show, and it was great in the ways that only great shows can be. Not just us, but Spotlights who opened, and Bungle who headlined, and the 3000 people who showed to witness it all, and to partake, had achieved a perfect balance of why, how, and the where’s of our present place in space.
Is this what it was that we were doing? I think, yes. And is this what we’d call “making it”? I have to believe so.
So while in previous diaries there’s a heavy dollop of snark, borderline antisocial behaviors involving poorly, or perfectly…depending on your perspective, placed urine, and fistfights, this tour diary, actually an intro to the diaries that will follow, attempts to contextualize all of this for you. Because? Because we’re not chimps. And while we’re not better than chimps our concerns are not chimp concerns, or at least the concerns of chimps that dance and gambol for their supper.
Our concerns are g-ddamned…existential. So as I sit in the back seat of a Mercedes Benz Sprinter, silent for the most part as I need to be to save my voice for the next show and the one beyond that, I think of the line from Apocalypse Now, Col. Kilgore’s: “some day this war’s going to be over,” he said. And there was sorrow in his voice for that which not many would have been sorrowful.
Which I totally understand/understood. But until it’s over? Rockets red glare, quiet moments staring out at the black-ribboned road from club to club, a keening physical separation from all that you love and death around every corner. Oh yeah, and ponds. Don’t forget the ponds.
OK…So you have ordered the memoir A Walk Across Dirty Water and Straight Into Murderer's Row, from Amazon…Or the Bookshop.Org dealie: Here?
Might you consider giving it a review in either of those places?
I’ve been told it matters, somehow. So please: review away! Unless you think it sucks. Then, maybe, just keep that part to yourself. At last count there were 61 reviews…so yeah…GET AT IT!!! Every one helps. Or so they tell me.
ALSO…on the aforementioned tour we only had 15 books to sell. Sorry. They were all sold out in Germany. Get them online and bring them to the remaining shows and I’ll sign them at the merch table.